Steve Cortes, former senior spokesman and strategist for the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and current head of the League of American Workers, said Republicans should focus on three specific key points leading up to the November 5 presidential election if President Joe Biden remains the Democratic Party’s nominee and refuses to be pushed from his post as commander in chief.
While some Democrats have called on Biden to step aside and not run for reelection, it appears the president is adamant about staying in the race to serve another four years.
Cortes said he believes Biden when the president says he is staying in the race, noting how Republicans should move forward by hitting Biden on policy issues in addition to his apparent decline.
The three points Cortes said Republicans should push leading up to the November election are Biden’s failures on inflation, immigration, and his own incapacity.
“Incapacity is going to be the third ‘I’. I’ve been saying for a long time that it’s inflation and immigration. Those are the dominant issues in all of the polling and all of the focus groups that people are most concerned about. Inflation and immigration, but it’s no longer the two ‘I’s, it’s now three because we can validly add ‘incapacity’ to that,” Cortes said on Friday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Cortes noted while Biden is to blame for the nation’s high inflation and the influx of illegal immigration, the president is not to blame for his incapacity.
“The inflation crisis is his fault. The open border, the immigration crisis is 100 percent his fault. He created those crises. His incapacity is not his fault,” Cortes said.
“I’m not trying to be cruel to him because him losing his faculties is not his fault. Most Americans have somebody in their life, perhaps somebody they’re very close to, who’s going through very similar issues. However, those people, whoever they are, are not fit to have any job of real significance and leadership status, and certainly not the job as commander in chief of this great country,” Cortes added.
Cortes said, however, that Biden’s incapacity is not just a political problem, but also a national security issue.
“We don’t just have a political problem. That’s clear. But we also have a national security problem that is imminent, that is here and now. We have a clear and present danger to this country that adversaries of the United States see that its commander in chief is, at least at times, badly incapacitated,” Cortes said.
Cortes also addressed Biden’s reluctance to “hand over the reins” of the presidency to Vice President Kamala Harris, saying how the president’s reluctance regarding his vice president “tells you quite a lot of what they actually think about Kamala Harris.”
“I believe that either Biden or those who are controlling Biden have realized that Kamala Harris – and this is harsh, but it’s the truth – was selected only because of her DEI identity politics characteristics and not because of her talent or qualifications,” Cortes said.
“As challenged as Biden is right now, cognitively, there is a bet effectively going on with the Democratic Party that he’s actually the better horse – both for this race and to act as president rather than Kamala Harris. That tells you quite a lot of what they actually think about Kamala Harris, and I believe that should also factor into voters’ decisions when you’re deciding whether or not you can support Joe Biden for president. Consider the fact that he selected a number two that he has so little confidence in that he’s willing to charge on in a clear state of incapacity rather than hand over the reins of power,” Cortes added.
Cortes also said Biden’s reluctance to leave the presidency stems from his decades-long “greed for power.”
“I believe that Joe Biden knows, and certainly Jill Biden knows, that if he steps down now, his legacy will forever be marked almost solely, especially as the years go on, by that debate meltdown. They are too drunk on power. They are too full of themselves, too megalomaniacal to live with that consequence and they believe that they can somehow save his legacy if they stay in office,” Cortes said.
“It’s about a lust for power. Let’s remember, this man’s been in Washington, D.C. for 50 years. He was elected in 1972 – the year I was born. I have adult children. I am not a young man, even though I might appear as such. I was in diapers when he was elected to the Senate. Think of that. Somebody who has been in the Washington sewer for that long chasing power for that long. He’s run for president in three different decades already. So this is somebody who has personified lust for power and I think, as much as his greed for power is out of hand, it sure seems that his wife’s is even at another level beyond that. That’s just the reality that, unfortunately, America has to live with right now. We shouldn’t have to live with it,” Cortes added.
Watch the full interview:
– – –
Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
